There is no denying that competitiveness is a part of the life both of an individual and of a community, or that, within limits, it is a useful and necessary part. But it is equally obvious that no individual can lead a good or a satisfying life under the rule of competition, and no community can succeed except by limiting somehow the competitiveness of its members. One cannot maintain one’s “competitive edge” if one helps other people. The advantage of “early adoption” would disappear—it would not be thought of—in a community that puts a proper value on mutual help. Such advantage would not be thought of by people intent on loving their neighbors as themselves. And it is impossible to imagine that there can be any reconciliation between local and national competitiveness and global altruism. The ambition to “feed the world” or “feed the hungry,” rising as it does out of the death struggle of farmer with farmer, proposes not the filling of stomachs, but the engorgement of the “bottom line.”
The strangest of all the doctrines of the cult of competition, in which admittedly there must be losers as well as winners, that the result of competition is invariably good for everybody, that altruistic ends may be met by a system without altruistic motives or altruistic means.
—excerpt essay Economy and Pleasure by Wendell Berry
